Emulex Corporation, a provider of converged networking solutions, has completed the acquisition of Endace Limited, a provider of converged networking solutions. Emulex acquired control of Endace, and beneficial ownership of 89% of the shares of Endace, on February 26, 2013. It has now completed the acquisition of beneficial ownership of 99.9% of the shares of Endace, and the process for the compulsory acquisition of the remaining Endace shares by Emulex pursuant to the New Zealand Takeovers Code has commenced.

Endace, with locations in Sunnyvale, CA, and Auckland, New Zealand, provides a network visibility infrastructure that enables organizations to accelerate response to network and security problems. Endace Intelligent Network Recorders are designed to capture, index and record network traffic, and scales from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps. EndaceVision, Endace's web-based application, enables engineers to visualize, search, and retrieve network traffic from any Endace Recorder across the network.

“Emulex and Endace are both leaders in the 10/40/100Gb Ethernet markets, and with this experience we are finding and solving the challenges of increased network performance and scalability sooner and better than others in the market, because we are the first to encounter the new challenges facing cloud and enterprise data centers at these network speeds,” Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development for Emulex, tells 5 Minute Briefing. “Together, we will be able to provide the only true end-to-end network performance management (NPM) solution because we are the only company to combine and integrate Ethernet end points and network path visibility into a single NPM infrastructure.”

Emulex Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) provide visibility into the application-level that was previously unavailable to the Endace NPM appliances, Walsh says. In turn, the Endace NPM appliances provide visibility into the network path that was not visible to the Emulex CNA end points, he adds. In the past, this gap prohibited true end-to-end application performance visibility and acceleration. “Together, we can now see the source, path and delivery of applications at every level of the network for cloud, telco and enterprise data centers,” says Walsh.

The combination of technologies will help IT shops in four main ways. First, it will enable improved application performance. “We can now use our end points and network performance management appliances to show where the network is affecting delivery of applications and use our end point drivers to provide the only true application-level insight that will optimize configuration and transport of data over networks,” says Walsh.

Second, by combining the Endace NPM appliances with Emulex’s next generation of CNA technology, which includes embedded virtual switching support, the companies can help accelerate next generation applications that heavily depend on east-west traffic between servers in the same rack or cluster. The flexible driver model and NPM traffic monitoring provide the ability to optimize the traffic inside racks and clusters to improve low latency application delivery for HPC (such as High Frequency Trading), faster sorting of big data for analytics, and improved service level agreements by reducing transfer time of virtual machines across physical servers.

In addition, the Endace appliance has the ability to host third-party applications, enabling IT managers to continue to work with their preferred software partner, but gain the benefits of complete network monitoring. And finally, Walsh notes, both Endace and Emulex have been active participants in the SDN and OpenStack management markets and will use their combined software and management tools to deliver integrated and flexible solutions for software defined data centers.